301 redirects

Besides simply moving a page from one location on your site to another, 301 redirects have a number of important uses, including:

* Moving your site to a new domain name.

* Cleaning up ugly dynamic URLs so that search engines can crawl them more easily (combined with a URL rewriting tool).

* Closing pages or entire sections of your site and making sure both your users and search engines don't run into link "dead-ends."

* Pointing your extra domain names or outdated sites at a single location to consolidate traffic and links.

* Prevent duplicate content problems when both the www and non-www version of your site are accessible.

* Prevent duplicate content problems when both the directory root (/) and index.html versions of a page are accessible.